Letter to the Sydney Morning Herald 25 October 2009
Tuckey's fat-headed forest fiction

   
“Every village has its idiot. Canberra has Wilson Tuckey. There is no notion so fat-headed, no nostrum so moonbat that it will not be trotted out by the Liberal member for O’Connor,” according to Mike Carlton (SMH 24/10/09).

I have no argument with that, but there is one mad Tuckey idea, a relic from his stint as John Howard’s Forestry Minister that the Rudd government has not only embraced, it has spent hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars promoting.

That is the Australian Forestry Standard for “environmental” certification of native forest logging and woodchipping.

This is a scheme that enables the logging industry to cut down and woodchip 600 year old trees and label the products as coming from “sustainably managed forest.”

The Australian government has funded the logging industry generously to promote this label overseas to potential buyers, conning them into buying woodchips from Australian native forests with a clear conscience.

You can’t get much more fat-headed or moonbat than that.
Harriett Swift